into vapour baths, mustard packs, wet and electric massages, with copious draughts from the sacred wells.
In a week he was reduced to a fine state of passive quietude, and could look round and observe his neighbour. One lady opposite him at dinner had been ordered to abstain rigidly from taking any salt with her food; another, close at hand, to regard sugar as poison to her system. The husband of the saltless lady was forced to exist on jugged hare exclusively; in fact, he began to think, as he heard the varied treatment of the patients, what a series of practical and remunerative jokes a doctor's life must be, and he no longer wondered that the successful ones wore such compressed lips and stolid faces, or that they could tell such capital stories after dinner without grinning. If he had only studied medicine and practised, he might have been able to endure his domestic calamities much more easily.
One patient, after fixing him with a glassy eye for several nights in the smoke-room without speaking, abruptly broke the spell of silence at last by saying,—
"I believe in diet entirely; but what do you think of the marriage laws?"
Philip thought for a moment, and then replied that "dieting was a good idea and that the marriage laws were decidedly faulty."
"Women are born devils—that's my opinion of them," replied the man savagely, and then he relapsed into gloomy silence.
"Another victim to matrimony," thought Philip, as he looked at the fire and puffed his pipe.
He spent an innocent week at this Hydropathic, where each visitor took the other on trust and made themselves agreeable, and if he had been at all impressionable might have drifted easily into matrimony a second
